Blogs as songlines

In university I studied Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines. A major theme of the book is how Australia’s aborigines map their land and record their history through songlines … songs that lead you from spring to well, mountain to valley, and songs that tell you what has occured at each step of the path.

A recent post on a book called Storycatcher reminded me.

Story is the song line of a person’s life.
We need to sing it and we need someone to hear the singing.
Story told, story heard, story written, story read
create the web of life in words.

To me, blogs – at least personal blogs – are storycatchers. They’re songlines.

My personal blog is a record of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, what I’ve experienced, and my thoughts along the way. It’s my storycatcher.

And it’s my songline for when I want to retrace my path. What did I do there? What was the name of that movie? Where did we go together? It’s all only a search away.

I developed that thought last year: Blogs as personal mobile databases. Robert Scoble said something similar a week or two ago when he was interviewed by Jennifer Jones: he uses Google to search his own blog and, basically, augment his memory of events.

Where’s your songline?

[tags] songlines, blogs, blogging, database, personal, scoble, podtech, bruce chatwin, john koetsier [/tags]